Salinastroika: less than meets the eye.

• Author: Payne, Douglas W.
• Position: President Carlos Salinas de Gortari

PRESIDENT CARLOS Salinas de Gortari took office in 1988 after an election most Mexicans believe he lost. Despite systematic fraud and enormous expenditures of state resources, the electoral alchemists of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) were able to conjure but a bare majority of votes for Salinas, according to official results. He was confirmed by the PRI-controlled Congress amid fisticuffs and raucous demonstrations by opposition legislators, while sealed packets of uninspected ballots from around the country lay strewn in the basement under armed guard. Never opened, they were eventually destroyed.

The legitimacy of the PRI, the party of the Mexican Revolution, in power since 1929, had been severely damaged. With the country mired in a prolonged economic crisis, a number of observers questioned whether Mexico, once considered a model of stability and civilian rule in Latin America, was on the verge of upheaval.

Salinas forged ahead, promising both "democracy and modernization with growth." But his accomplishments have been primarily on the economic front. Salinas has wielded the enormous power of the Mexican presidency to impose a remarkable overhaul and radical opening of the economy. The question is whether his intention has been to use renewed economic growth to lay the groundwork for a transition to democracy, or to refinance, retool, and preserve the PRI's domination of the country.

After five years, the basic structures of the traditional state-party system are still intact. Modest political liberalization under Salinas has been designed primarily to quiet opposition protests and international criticism. Despite somewhat improved electoral laws, the Federal Electoral Institute which must enforce them remains answerable to the Interior Ministry, the president's principal instrument for controlling national politics.

As Salinas enters the final year of his term, it is evident that whatever ideas he may have once had about serious political reform, the priority now is to maintain political control during the presidential succession. As he stated in September when touting the latest electoral reforms, the new laws would ensure "political civility" and reduce the "perspective of tension" in the presidential elections next August.

Salinas is angling to avoid a repetition of the trauma of 1988. But while economic modernization seems to have instilled a measure of optimism among many Mexicans, his political maneuvering has not resolved the crisis of legitimacy at the root of the PRI's near collapse. Recent opinion polls indicate that barely a third of the electorate believes the 1994 vote will be clean. Last July, after a poor turnout in two state elections won by the PRI, the joke among Mexicans was that the televised soccer match between Mexico and Argentina the same day had been a better draw because the outcome was not known in advance.

In August a ranking PRI official assured a forum on democracy in Latin America that the PRI not only would win next year's election, it would "win legitimacy, too." But legitimacy will not be attained simply by engineering a less dirty election. It must be achieved by establishing a system of checks and balances through which citizens can hold their government accountable--in short, a democratic rule of law.

That will not be Salinas's legacy. What he will be remembered for is creating a climate that has quickened the impulse toward democratization in Mexican society. Breaking down commercial barriers has meant the erosion of psychological barriers to modernity which are rooted in Spanish colonialism and have sustained Mexico's authoritarian traditions. Along with investment dollars have come democratic values and ideas about modern civil society that are fueling the demand for more independent and meaningful political expression.

The process will be difficult to reverse because the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) virtually guarantees that Mexico will remain open to the world. Salinas therefore will be handing on the challenge of political modernization to his hand-picked successor. However, the next president will also be beholden, as his predecessors have been, to the political system that has brought him to power. Although the genie of democracy is out of the bottle, the urge to preserve rather than transform that system will remain strong.

Rule by Power Rather than Law

ON PAPER Mexico's political framework is not unlike that of the United States. The Mexican Constitution of 1917 provides for an elected bicameral congress, a supreme court, and a president elected for a six-year term. It defines citizens' rights in a similar, although much broader way than the U.S. Constitution. Governors and legislative bodies of the thirty-one states are elected as are municipal governments, with the exception of the Federal District (Mexico City) whose chief executive is appointed by the president.

But the nature of power in Mexico and how it functions do not correspond to the constitution. The violent turmoil of the 1910-17 Revolution did not end with its implementation, as revolutionary generals fought for power in a series of civil wars, mutinies and revolts that lasted nearly through the 1920s. One of those generals, Plutarco Elias Calles, finally put an end to the fratricide in "the revolutionary family" by founding the National Revolutionary Party, later renamed the Institutional Revolutionary Party, in 1929.

While the constitution of 1917 drew on the U.S. and French revolutionary experience, in creating the PRI Calles adapted the concepts of centralism and political party fronts that were then taking hold in Europe. The potential of these ideas was later demonstrated in the extreme in the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy, and Spain.

For Calles, however, who had become President in 1924, the need was not to achieve power, but to consolidate it. He therefore established the PRI as an all-embracing party of the state, imposing membership on government officials, bureaucratic sectors, intellectuals, judges, the hundreds of parties and movements spawned by the Revolution, and the army. It was an authoritarian, top-down structure held together through cooptation, corruption and, when those failed, repression.

Calles wrapped the PRI in the national colors of green, white, and red, and declared the party's allegiance to the "ideals of the Mexican Revolution." But its real allegiance was to monopoly power and stability. The democratic framework enshrined in the Constitution was reduced to trappings, elections to ritual formalities. The separation of powers would exist only on paper, the gloss on a pyramid of power headed by the president in the personalistic tradition that dates back to the Aztec empire of Moctezuma and the Spanish Conquest by Hernan Cortes.

One "ideal" enshrined in the constitution that Calles could not subvert was the principle of "No reelection," the rallying cry against the former dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. Although Calles managed to control the government from behind the scenes for a number of years, he was...